Category: Blog

Listening is such a hard thing to do. It’s underestimated how beneficial it is for everyone and at the same time we are rarely able to do it right.

Why? Because true listening starts with setting aside ego, leaving it out of the room so that you can listen freely and with no prejudice.

If you really want to listen to something the first rule would be to not talk.

If you need to talk the only way to continue listening is by asking question that dig deeper into the topic.
Avoid questions whose goal is to expose the limits of the presentation of your collegue or the errors.
Instead, ask question about the subject, if something isn’t quite clear, ask why is that, what’s the difference.

But the less you talk, the more you listen.
Then if the goal of this entire discussion is for you to learn something or to show that you understood the problem, or even that it’s clear what was your mistake, then repeat with your own words what has been said to you.

Much like a summary or a movie trailer, try to list all the information you grasped. 
This will produce two effects:
* It’ll allow you to be sure of what you learned and check if you listened and understood
* It’ll allow the other person to see that you were actively listening, you were participating.

Too often we listen only to say “I got it”. Which shows only our ego, our “I’m the best” type of behaviour.

To show if you truly grasped a concept there’s no better way than repeating it and this will always make the other person happy if you can put it using your own words in a truly sincere way.

A nice concept I discovered is how we do learn.

Did you ever go to a friend to give him/her some great advice in the hope that it’ll change his/her life only to find out they won’t listen?

It’s frustrating. You feel powerless.
Well, this happens for many reasons.

• We might not be in the mood.
• We might not like how you’re saying it
• We might not understand it
• We might hate showing vulnerabilities.

And even though you remove all these roadblocks, the message might not get through and that’s because of _timing_.

Timing is everything, as it is in shopping, in life. You wouldn’t try to go to the bathroom if you don’t need to, you wouldn’t try to sell things to a poor man, you would wait until you have the conditions to do it.

Learning works the same way. You need to have the appropriate timing and context otherwise you’re wasting your time.

How to get the right timing varies from person to person but we all do have one thing in common: The tide.

There are some moments in life when we are more open to change, to new information. Those moments are when we all are riding the Tide. We’re on the top of it.

That’s when we should give advice, share information. If the person is on the lower part of the Tide then leave them alone. Nobody would ever hear your advices. Wait for the tide to get back up, because it’ll get there eventually.

Your team just screwed it up.
They made something entirely different, or left a gigantic bug.

You’re the higher in command aside from your boss, then you have a chain of people under you, and the last person in the chain made the mistake.

Whenever I think about this a story comes to mind. It’s a story of a small company making videogames on facebook. They somewhat became famous and got a big money cashflow, so they hired a new junior developer.

The work there was very fast, and one day the junior developer did delete the entire production database. Destroying months, if not years of work.

Who’s to blame then? What would you do?
The company blamed it on the junior developer and fired it.

Seems legit right? You break everything, you should pay for it.
But if you think about it, who did gave that power to the junior developer? Maybe his superior, without explaining enough to be careful.
And who _didn’t_ put in place regular backups? Maybe his superior.
And why the backups weren’t put in place? Maybe because the boss didn’t want them to spend time on such topics because they had a business to run and they’d lose money.

So, who’s to blame?
Whenever such big mistake comes out it’s easy to point directly to the final error. But what _led_ there, was a chain of command.
The reason why your boss gets more money than you is that he/she have more responsibilities, and is holds true also for your superior.

Is the junior guy responsible? Yes, but also are his superior and the boss. All of them are and all of them should pay _based on their responsibilities_.
The more you have, the more it’s your fault.

Therefore in most of the cases the answer to “Who’s to blame” should be “Me”.

If you’re already skilled and get paid to work, what’s so hard?

In your daily work, did you ever thought about “How hard it is to program?” or to “Make a marketing plan” or “Make a cappuccino” or to “Make a pizza”?

Did you ever thought your basic requirements for working were too high for you? I doubt it. It’s not that. 
What’s hard is communication, is managing people, is finding agreements between the various parts.

But no, working doesn’t belong to this complexity, working is the easy part. Once you learned how to do the basic job, that’s easy. The hard thing is to communicate, to be empathic, to get things moving.

It’s absurd to think that in a world made of people you can leave out people from the equations. They are not numbers they are part of the system and as such you have to learn how to deal with them. How to communicate so that each and every person will feel special in a meaningful way, so that they can contribute.

Your work is 35% work, 65% communication.
Think about it when you want to learn something new.

What happens when your boss comes to you and ask you if you can finish this -superbig project- in 10 days?

You might be tempted to say yes, to please the boss even though you know it’s impossible and it’ll require you to do some extra work.

What would happen then is that one day your boss might come for _another_ job on the same level, and another one, and another one.

That lie will build up until it won’t be sustainable. You’ll be overwhelmed unless you change something in the equation.

This is a common situation if you think about marketing and selling. We’re used to think that to sell you have to lie. To sell things you can’t have because it’s more important to get the client and then “who cares”. Right?

It’s a short term benefit, but not a long term strategy. 
It can’t be a long term strategy because it’s not sustainable. What’s the right answer then if your boss comes over with such complex questions?

Take time. 
Say “Give me 30 minutes to think about it”.
Or maybe it a day, one week, whatever seems enough to get a hold of what you need.
You might not get a perfect answer, but at least you will know that your answer is based on actual information and not because you want to be nice to the boss.

After all it all boils down to say more No’s in life. 
It’s like when your friend come over and tells you a great idea, would you want to partecipate in it?
If you say yes to all your friends you would probably end up doing nothing and be overwhelmed again.

As you see this applies to each part of life.
We have _finite_ time, mind and resources.
Our goal is to make our best with what we have and play for the long run, not the short run.

I know, the short term benefit is appealing, but the long term strategy always outshine any short term benefit as long as you’re going for it.

Think about razors. When they were first invented nobody would ever thought that the money wouldn’t have come from selling the razor. In fact, you could even sell the razor for a lower price because what would be the n°1 moneymaker would be razor blades.

Razor blades, yes, because you would pay them each month, each year, forever.
With one razor you would have a recurring revenue that would last forever. That’s a long term strategy.

But if you played it short term maybe you would have sold the razor at a higher price, lowering the adoption and thus losing the race.

To get that though you have to learn to say no and yes to the right things, taking into account what’s most precious: Your time.